Israel Contemplates a Future Without Netanyahu

As corruption allegations mount against the Prime Minister, his air of invincibility has been punctured.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has thrown in his lot with Trump and rising anti-liberal forces.

Photograph by Mandel Ngan / AFP / Getty

Israel is famously low on pomp and circumstance. Attend an Israeli
wedding and guests are likely to appear in jeans, with sunglasses
perched on their foreheads. When Donald Trump landed at Ben Gurion
Airport last May, the Israeli government tried to keep it stately—red
carpet, military orchestra—but it wasn’t long before a member of the
ruling Likud Party whipped out his cell phone and snapped a selfie with
the American President on the tarmac. So minimal is the ceremoniousness
that, whenever it exists, it tends to take on outsized meaning.

One such ceremony took place on Monday, when Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu met with President Trump in the Oval Office. Netanyahu tried
to project an air of business as usual—the relationship between the
United States and Israel “has never been better,” he gushed—even as
Trump may have quickened the Israeli leader’s pulse by saying,
nonchalantly, that “we have a shot” at “doing” peace with the
Palestinians. But only one thing was on the mind of the travelling
Israeli press corps. A reporter asked, “Prime Minister Netanyahu, would
you like to comment about the latest news coming from Israel?”

“I will later,” Netanyahu replied quietly, maintaining a glued-on smile.
It was a momentary exchange, imperceptible, perhaps, to American
audiences, but not to Israelis who lately mine the Prime Minister’s
every move for clues of what’s to come.

On February 13th, Netanyahu, citing poor weather conditions for the
flying of his government-issued helicopter, abruptly scrapped plans to
attend the opening of a rehabilitation facility in the northern city of
Tiberias. Reports in the Israeli press later confirmed why. Netanyahu
had learned that at 8:45 that evening, the police were set to issue
their findings in two corruption investigations against him: one, called
Case 1000, alleging that he had accepted bribes from two tycoons in the
form of cigars, champagne, and jewelry for his wife, Sara; the
other—Case 2000—an investigation into whether he had colluded with the
publisher of a major newspaper to receive favorable coverage, all of
which he has vehemently denied. In a third corruption case, a former
Netanyahu spokesman is alleged to have approached a judge in 2015 with a
proposed deal: the judge would be named attorney general if she dropped
a case against Netanyahu’s wife for misusing a hundred thousand dollars
in public funds. (The Netanyahus have dismissed the charges as “absurd
and unfounded,” and referred to the alleged offer to the judge as
“hallucinatory.”)

The “news from Israel” that the reporter asked Netanyahu about as he met
with the Trump were reports that the Prime Minister’s former spokesman,
Nir Hefetz, had agreed to become the third former aide to coöperate with
investigators and turn over recordings of Netanyahu and his wife in
exchange for not standing trial. Hefetz’s coöperation could be the most
significant development yet in the corruption cases surrounding
Netanyahu.

After Netanyahu’s meeting with Trump, his office issued a statement
saying that the latest allegations were “nonsense.” For months,
Netanyahu and his shrinking inner circle of advisers have tried to
prepare his base for the worst by publicly stating that the police were
going to implicate him in corruption cases. “So what?” Netanyahu told a
gathering of supporters last December. “Over sixty per cent of police
recommendations end up in the trash.”

Yet the decision by the head of the Israeli police on February 13th to recommend
that Netanyahu be prosecuted on two counts of bribery,
fraud, and breach of trust undermined his denials. Most damaging,
perhaps, was the disclosure of an alleged quid pro quo with one of the
tycoons, the Israeli Hollywood producer Arnon Milchan, which Netanyahu
had until then tried to portray as a gift of mere trifles by a friend
with nothing promised in return. But the sum of money the police
outlined—nearly three hundred thousand dollars—could no longer be
brushed off as merely “a cigar,” as Netanyahu had described it. One by
one, the police listed assurances from Netanyahu to Milchan, including
the promise of a ten-year extension of a tax-exemption law for
repatriated Israelis, from which Milchan would have directly benefited. Milchan denies wrongdoing and maintains that the gifts were not bribes.

Moments before the police released their recommendation that he be
prosecuted, a beleaguered Netanyahu, flanked by two Israeli flags, gave
a fiery speech from his residence. “You know I do everything with only
one thing in mind—the good of the country,” he said. “Not for cigars
from a friend, not for media coverage, not for anything. Only for the
good of the state.” In a sign of desperation, he then opted for the
Israeli equivalent of two Hail Marys: he recounted his long and storied
service in the military and name-dropped the late Shimon Peres as
someone who, like him, had worked to advance the interests of Milchan.
(There is no Israeli politician, it would seem, that the film mogul
didn’t try to cozy up to.) The police findings, Netanyahu concluded,
were “biased and extreme, and full of holes like a Swiss cheese.”

Both cases are now with Israel’s attorney general, a Netanyahu
appointee, who will decide whether to indict the Prime Minister. Another
investigation, which has ensnared some of the people closest to
Netanyahu but in which he hasn’t officially been named as a target,
involves suspected conflicts of interest surrounding Israel’s purchase
of German-made submarines and missile ships. The breadth of the
inquiries attests to three hallmarks that have come to define
Netanyahu’s rule: hobnobbing with moneyed interests, an obsession with
the media, and a sense that he alone can promote Israel’s security
interests.

Israeli law prohibits a cabinet minister from serving under indictment
but says nothing about an indicted Prime Minister. This means that
Netanyahu could, in theory, govern through the end of his term, in
November, 2019, even if charges were brought against him. Many analysts
wouldn’t put this past him. “It’s the Louis XIV syndrome,” Nahum Barnea,
Israel’s preëminent columnist, for Yediot Ahronot, told me. “More than
just saying that the state is him, his feeling and the feeling of those
around him, is that the damage to the party and the country by him
resigning would be so great that it’s worth doing things that would have
been unthinkable were it anyone else.”

Still, there are indications that Netanyahu’s coalition of
ultranationalist and ultra-Orthodox parties—fragile to begin with—might
not survive an indictment. Netanyahu can afford to lose only six seats
out of parliament’s hundred and twenty seats for his government to
collapse. While Likud still comes in ahead of all other parties in
recent polls, its coalition partners “might not stand the heat in the
kitchen of public opinion,” Amit Segal, a political correspondent for
Israel’s Channel 2, told me.

Other Israeli leaders had been stained by corruption before. Ehud Olmert
served sixteen months in prison for bribery and fraud; before him, Ariel
Sharon was alleged to have accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars in
what became known as the “Greek Island Affair,” though no charges were
ever brought against him. The difference, according to Doron Navot, a
scholar of Israeli corruption who has written extensively on the
subject, is that Netanyahu’s misconduct is part of a far-reaching
political agenda. Netanyahu has served longer than any other Israeli
Prime Minister apart from David Ben-Gurion, yet Netanyahu still operates
as an underdog, fuelled by divisiveness and resentment against the
country’s “élites”: the courts, media, academia, and now even the
police. “Sharon and Olmert didn’t go against democratic institutions;
they were part of them,” Navot told me. “Netanyahu doesn’t simply go
against these institutions and tries to annihilate them, he is motivated
by a belief in his singular role in Jewish history. That in itself
breeds corruption, because it can be used to justify almost anything.”

A week after the police released findings in Cases 1000 and 2000, a
Netanyahu confidant who once ran the communications ministry under him
agreed to provide evidence in a vast and separate graft inquiry, known
as Case 4000, involving Israel’s telecommunications giant, Bezeq. “I
carried out clear instructions from Netanyahu,” Shlomo Filber told
police investigators, according to Israel’s Channel 2. “He clarified to
me who should be looked out for, and how.” (“This never happened,”
Netanyahu said in response.)

Of the various investigations, the allegation that Netanyahu’s wife
mishandled public funds by ordering catering services when the
Netanyahus already employed a full-time chef may seem of secondary
importance—a mere distraction. But the alleged efforts to clear her name
by bribing a judge appear to bolster what insiders have long argued:
that Sara’s hold on her husband is such that her personal grudges often
dictate his policy. It is in large part because of Sara, those who know
them say, that Netanyahu now finds himself with no heir apparent. As Uzi
Arad, Netanyahu’s former national-security adviser, told me, “She
directs him, and points at real or imagined enemies, and by doing that
she has exacerbated his already existing paranoias.” Arad added, “There
are people she doesn’t allow to come to the residence. Anyone who
criticizes them is seen as a leftist, even if their credentials are to
the right of Netanyahu.”

By neutering political debate in Israel, Netanyahu has made the focus personal, drawing attention to the murky underside of his governing.

Photograph by Jack Guez / AFP / Getty

Another figure who has grown in importance as Netanyahu’s inner circle
has narrowed is the Prime Minister’s eldest son, Yair. At twenty-six,
Yair still lives with his parents at taxpayers’ expense. He doesn’t have
a job and is known primarily for directing much of his father’s
social-media presence and for tarnishing Israeli human-rights groups
online. In January, an illicit audio recording was released of Yair,
during a night out with friends, talking about paying prostitutes and
strippers and offering to set up his ex-girlfriend with an acquaintance
in order to settle a financial debt. The combination of his denigration
of women (“Let’s ‘load’ the waitress,” Yair told his friends at one
point), the amounts of money being tossed around casually, as well as
the fact that a state-funded driver chauffeured the drunken group from
one strip club to another, made for explosive material in Israel. Yair
has since issued a tepid apology. But his dubious reputation was nothing
new.

Last summer, after the deadly neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville,
Virginia, Yair weighed in from across the ocean, drawing an equivalence
between neo-Nazis and leftist demonstrators. “To put things in
perspective. I’m a Jew, I’m an Israeli, the neo nazis scums in Virginia
hate me and my country. But they belong to the past,” he wrote on his
private Facebook page. “However, the thugs of Antifa and BLM who hate my
country (and America too in my view) just as much are getting stronger
and stronger.” The post was taken down two days after it was published,
and it’s unclear whether the Prime Minister knew about it. But the
message resonated: Netanyahu had thrown in his lot with Trump and with
rising anti-liberal forces.

Israelis have generally drifted rightward after the failure of two
rounds of peace talks, in 2000 and 2008, and Netanyahu has become
increasingly reliant on a far-right coalition of parties. Yet polls show
that the dominance of his right-wing bloc may now be imperilled. Its
main threat comes from a four-year-old centrist party called Yesh Atid
(“There Is a Future”), headed by Yair Lapid, a telegenic former
journalist and television host who has taken on the anti-corruption
mantle. In a surprising recent revelation, Lapid was named a key state
witness in Case 1000. Lapid served as the finance minister from 2013 to
2015; he is said to have testified that, during that period, Netanyahu
personally asked him to extend the tax-exemption law that would have
benefitted Milchan, a request that Lapid turned down but never reported
at the time.

Netanyahu’s visit to Washington is certain to endow him with the stature
he desperately needs. His speech on Tuesday to the pro-Israel group
AIPAC will provide him with the ultimate platform to hold forth on the
one issue that may stand between him and political ouster: Iran.

Last month, an Iranian drone entered Israeli airspace, from the north,
and was felled by Israeli missiles. The drone was fashioned after an
American aircraft that Iran intercepted in 2011, suggesting that Iranian
military capabilities have grown far more sophisticated than analysts
had previously thought. In retaliation, the Israeli Air Force, which has
been operating covertly in Syria since 2012, sent F-16 fighter jets to
attack an Iranian command center in central Syria. On the flight back to
Israel, Syrian anti-aircraft missiles struck one of the F-16s. It was
the first time an Israeli plane had been downed since 1982, an
indication that the regional map has changed dramatically: Iran has
taken advantage of the chaos in Syria to entrench its Revolutionary
Guard forces less than five miles from the Israeli border.

Sixty-nine per cent of Israelis believe that, despite the international
agreement reached in 2015, Tehran is on the verge of achieving nuclear
capabilities that would be existentially threatening to the state of
Israel, according to the Israel Democracy Institute. And with Iran now
widening its influence in Syria and in Lebanon, by way of Hezbollah,
Israelis may be too wary to replace Netanyahu, their self-styled Mr.
Security.

Despite the cheerful air that Netanyahu tried to project during his
meeting with Trump, those who know him say that he is increasingly
rattled, on edge, and isolated. His entourage of close advisers is
gone—all embroiled in scandals and forced to resign or, worse, testify
against him. But Netanyahu has been prematurely written off before. In
the days leading up to the last elections, in 2015, polls showed Likud
losing by four seats to the Zionist Union (a center-left coalition of
the historic Labor Party and a smaller party called Hatnuah). But then
came Netanyahu’s famous dog whistle—Arab voters were “coming out in
droves to the ballot boxes,” he warned—and Likud won handily. He was
deemed “the magician,” back from the dead.

This time, however, his air of invincibility is punctured. Many in
Israel believe that he may call for early elections, if only to preëmpt
having to run with an indictment hanging over his head. “There’s an
uneasy feeling in Likud that the slogan that brought down the Party in
the nineteen-nineties—‘Corrupt people, we’re sick of you’—is back, and
the fear is that Likud will fall because of this,” Yoaz Hendel, a former
communications adviser for Netanyahu, told me. All this has led
Netanyahu’s admirers and detractors alike to imagine a scenario that was
once unimaginable: a political landscape without him.

If there is a signature achievement to Benjamin Netanyahu’s decade in
power, it may be the hollowing out of political debate in Israel. For
much of the country’s history, the public has been split into two
prevailing world views: those who stress historic rights—who see the
Biblical Land of Israel as covering the entire area between the
Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River—and those who believe in civil
rights, arguing that the occupation of another people is not only
unsustainable but unconscionable. The left reigned exclusively from 1948
until 1977; the right has ruled for most of the past four decades. But
both camps used to have more or less equal numbers. Not anymore. Only
eight per cent of Israeli Jews now define themselves as left wing;
thirty-seven per cent identify with the right, and fifty-five per cent
with the center. And just what “the center” means has changed, too: it
is now considered a legitimate position to support the expulsion or
transfer of Arabs from Israel. In fact, forty-eight per cent of Jewish
Israelis support the idea, compared with forty-six per cent who don’t,
according to a Pew Research poll from 2016.

But these statistics bely an even greater transformation that Israeli
society has undergone during the Netanyahu years: a turning inward,
against so-called “enemies from within.” The sense of solidarity that
has characterized Israeli society since the founding of the state is
fraying, while sectarianism, orchestrated by Netanyahu, is on the rise.
The Palestinian question rarely features in the public discourse
anymore. There is no talk of a two-state solution, because the consensus
is that the status quo is going to reign. When Netanyahu began his first
term in office, in 1996, there were a hundred and thirty-four thousand
Jewish settlers living in the West Bank and Gaza; now, in the West Bank,
there are about half a million. This mushrooming of the settlement
project has made the drawing of a future Palestinian state with any
cohesive borders a monumental challenge.

Netanyahu has remade Likud in his image—so much so that it is now
unclear whether the Party can survive without him. “The day after Bibi,
in Likud, an all-out war will break out,” Tal Shalev, a political
reporter for the online news site Walla, told me. While no government
minister has come out against Netanyahu, so far, many are said to be
growing restless. Yet not a single Likud leader today is seen as Prime
Minister material.

The only two figures who consistently score high in national opinion
polls have both left Likud in recent years, reportedly feeling waylaid
by Netanyahu. The first is Moshe Kahlon, a popular former communications
minister who is single-handedly credited with breaking up Israel’s
mobile-phone monopoly. Kahlon is now the head of a centrist party,
Kulanu (“All of Us”), whose platform focusses primarily on
bread-and-butter issues. Kulanu garnered ten seats in the last election,
a moderate achievement, and Kahlon was appointed the finance minister.
He is seen to be in no rush to topple the government. In many ways, he
may be the last peg holding together Netanyahu’s Jenga tower of a
coalition.

Gideon Sa’ar is the other well-regarded ex-Likudnik. Sa’ar finished
first in the Likud primaries in both 2008 and 2012, but, when Netanyahu
passed on giving him a serious ministerial portfolio after the 2015
election, he announced a “time out” from politics: “There is crazy
hatred” between him and Netanyahu, Shalev told me. Sa’ar has been
unequivocal about his intentions since. “My goal is to lead the country
in the future,” he said last summer.

What would a government under these possible contenders look like? The
difference, analysts say, would be one of shading, not of substance. If
Netanyahu’s rule is characterized by a seizing of the base and then an
appeal to the center, almost as an afterthought, some of his potential
replacements—such as Kahlon—may attempt to rule from the center first
and only then cater to the right. Still, with a majority of Knesset
seats firmly in control of a right-wing bloc, the diplomatic stasis and
the attempt to weaken Israel’s democratic institutions will likely
continue apace. So will the process of hadata, or “religionization,”
in schools, universities, and the military.

“The question is how much the behavior of the past year or two is
setting up new norms, and that’s what I fear most,” Zeev Sternhell, a
leading Israeli intellectual and scholar of fascism, told me. He pointed
to two areas of particular concern: the attempt by the government to
delegitimize the Supreme Court and a narrowing of the definition of
democracy to include only the process of election and a protection of
the rights of the majority. “Those two things have so embedded
themselves into our society that they may be rooted as the new normal
after Bibi.”

Israel’s Labor Party has seen better days. Its primaries tend to draw
out the diminishing old guard of the Zionist left: weathered
kibbutzniks, veteran union members, silver-haired academics. Last July,
however, one candidate was in every way atypical. Avi Gabbay, the
seventh child of immigrants from Morocco, is fifty-one, grew up in
Israel’s impoverished transit camps and rose to become the C.E.O. of the
telecommunications company Bezeq before joining Kahlon’s Kulanu Party,
in 2014. Gabbay later stunned the political establishment—perhaps none
more so than his mentor, Kahlon—by announcing his intention to switch
parties and seek the Labor chairmanship. Kahlon has reportedly not
spoken to him since.

In the Labor primary last year, Gabbay vanquished his opponents and
turned his sights on Netanyahu in his acceptance speech. “If we stick to
the old system of saying ‘Netanyahu isn’t good,’ and this, and that, and
champagne bottles, we won’t beat him,’” Gabbay said.

After Gabbay’s surprise victory, he accepted an offer from Ayman Odeh,
the leader an alliance of predominantly Arab parties known as the Joint
List, to broker a phone call between Gabbay and Mahmoud Abbas, the head
of the Palestinian Authority. “It was a good phone call,” Odeh told me.
But then, about a month later, Gabbay’s public statements were much less
conciliatory. “We won’t sit with the Joint List in the same government,
period. We have nothing in common with them,” Gabbay told voters in
southern Israel. A few days later, he told an interviewer that peace
wouldn’t necessarily require uprooting any Jewish settlement. His
statements hit dovish Israelis like a dagger. “A Labor Party leader who
says it would be possible to have peace with the Palestinians without
dismantling any settlements is either mocking himself and others, or is
willfully lying,” Sternhell told me. “A serious man he is not.”

Such is the predicament of the left in Israel: Stick to your ideology
and you wind up alienating most of the public; abandon it, and you risk
losing your base. Immediately after Gabbay’s primary win, polls showed a
small bump for Labor—narrowing the gap with Likud from six seats to four
or five—but, by February, any advantage had disappeared. Labor is
projected to secure fewer than fifteen seats in the next election, a
thorough humiliation.

Yair Lapid’s party, Yesh Atid, targets Israel’s swelling middle
class—the same young urbanites who were part of the social-justice
movement that took to the streets of Israel in 2011. Lapid’s base is
aggrieved by what’s referred to in Israel as “the inequality of the
burden.” They serve in the military and pay high taxes, while other
sectors of society, especially ultra-Orthodox communities, are exempt
from military service and are seen as living off the state.

Because of his good looks and charisma, the fifty-four-year-old Lapid
has been dubbed by some the “Israeli Macron.” Like the French President,
he has enjoyed an outsider status despite having served as finance
minister. In 2013, Yesh Atid upended the political map by winning
nineteen seats and becoming Israel’s second largest party. In 2015, it
slipped down to eleven seats. Now, however, there is talk of the Party
going all the way. Polls in January showed that, by uniting with
Kahlon’s party and poaching a former I.D.F. chief of staff to run as a
future defense minister, Lapid could beat Netanyahu. Without those
partners, though, Netanyahu would prevail in a head-to-head contest.

As the head of a new party, Lapid is ideologically unburdened. He is a
pragmatist, an adapter—or as some say, an opportunist. “Lapid has a
political program that is very organized and its name is Yair Lapid,”
Odeh told me.

I spoke to Lapid, by phone, in January. He had recently returned from a
meeting of centrist politicians in the Netherlands and he clearly wished
to position himself in line with moderation. “The real political fight
is between populists and responsible leaders,” he told me. “After the
tones in the American election, and after Brexit, the world wants
responsible leadership.” The implication was that Netanyahu represented
the other side—that of the irresponsible populists.

Yet Lapid is also aware that, in order to mount a real challenge against
Netanyahu, he cannot afford to alienate the Prime Minister’s base. When
I told him that there seemed to be a contradiction between his own
growing popularity and Israelis’ professed drift rightward, he
disagreed. “The terms ‘right’ and ‘left’ are becoming irrelevant,” he
told me. “When people ask about my party, I say that we’re a
national-liberal party. That defines us much more than left, right, or
center,” he added.

Press him for specifics on the Palestinian issue, however, and he grows
vague. “Things need to be done,” he says, but “cautiously.” He also
argued that regarding Syria and Iran there was no space between the
country’s political parties. “On that issue, there is no internal debate
in Israel,” he said. “So then the voters are divided not over what’s
being stated but whether or not they believe the person making the
statements.”

And that, in the end, may be as accurate a summary as any for where
Israel is at as it enters its seventieth year. Israeli politics
increasingly take place in the yawning gap between nice-sounding
rhetoric and what is perceived to be a chaotic and volatile regional
reality—always too chaotic and too volatile for meaningful negotiations
to take place. Absent any diplomatic progress, the debate turns to
domestic issues, and elections hinge on perceptions of the political
system itself and the legitimacy of its democratic institutions. These
are crucial issues, to be sure, but they are ones that shouldn’t be
called into question in the first place in a liberal democracy.

It is an irony of no small proportions that Netanyahu may, in time, be
viewed as the instigator of his own undoing: by neutering political
debate in Israel, he has made the focus personal, drawing attention to
the murky underside of his governing. Assuming that he will still be at
the top of his party’s ticket, the next Israeli election will be less an
open race than a referendum on his rule. There is a common saying in
Israel: elections are not won; they are lost. With no term limits for
Prime Ministers, power is seen as the incumbent’s to lose. This is all
the more true these days, with a Prime Minister who has at least four
open investigations aimed at him. Does it feel like the end of an era, I
asked Lapid, toward the end of our conversation. “It does,” he said,
then corrected himself. “It feels like the beginning of the end.”

This article has been updated to include a publicly reported denial of wrongdoing by Milchan.